What’s the Biggest Hard Drive You Can Fit in a Macbook Pro?

Perhaps you’ve got…ahem…150k photos to tote around, or you’re a active gamer, or maybe you’re just a major pirate…either way, most people who keep a computer for more than a year or two are likely to want to want to upgrade the hard drive sooner or later. So the question becomes, “Just how much space can I fit in that machine?” And the answer is, “It depends upon how badly you want it.”

Note: This post has been updated on 9-7-2013 with the latest available drives, which gives more you more choices (and more capacity) than the original post.

Note 2: This post has been updated again on 1-2-2014 with the latest available drives, not least of which was Toshiba dropping their 1.5GB Aquarius offering.

Note 3: Update from 3-9-2014: This all just got a lot simpler, due to the release of this Seagate 2TB Slim drive. It is now possible to put 4TB into the Macbook or Macbook Pro, using the methods outlined below, with no fitment issues.

Note 5: With the release of 2TB SSDs, it’s now possible to fit up to 4TB of SSDs in your Macbook Pro or Mac Mini.

Note 6: Update from 2-2016: Seagate has now released a 2.5″ 3TB and 4TB drives, but it is important to note that these drives are 15mm, which will not fit without issue inside your machine – this is the same size as the Western Digital drive shown in the pictures below. So the short of it is, yes, they will work in place of the original hard drive, but look at the photos below to determine whether that’s right for you. For those wanting to use these drives internally, who don’t want to have to open a USB enclosure to remove them, they are available as bare drives as well.

You have four different maximal storage capacities available to you, depending upon how “non-standard” you’re willing to get with your machine. And for the record: The following information is valid for any unibody Macbook Pro of any size (13″, 15″, 17″), but NOT for Retina models (for what’s available in the Macbook Air and Retina area, see this.

If you’re willing to simply replace the hard drive with a larger one, using all stock internals and mounting, your max possible storage is 2TB.

If you’re willing to remove the DVD and replace it with a second hard drive, but wish to keep your shock protection for the primary drive, the max is now 4TB.

Primary Drive Choices

For a 1.5TB drive, you can use the HGST (formerly Hitachi, but now owned by Western Digital), 1.5TB, 9.5mm drive, which fits with room to spare. What is critical, is that you make sure the drive in question is not taller than 12.5mm in height. The HGST will fit in either the DVD location or the standard hard drive location. Please note: Western digital has a 1.5GB drive, but it is the same height as their 2TB drive listed below, and this will not fit in the DVD location.

For the 2TB drive, which now also fits in either the standard hard drive location or the DVD bay, and fits WITH the mounting pegs, you need this Seagate drive. It’s important you choose this specific drive, as there are others with non standard Sata connectors. Also note that the Western Digital drive pictured below is and older, taller drive, which did not fit in both locations, and resulted in a case “bulge” as seen in the last photo. See more about this in the next paragraph. The Seagate drive pictured above does not have this issue.

Western Digital Fit note – Please note that this WAS PREVIOUSLY the only 2TB drive and it was a 15mm high drive. This meant the drive is actually approximately 1mm taller than the drive bay in your Macbook Pro. With this drive in your notebook, the bottom panel of your computer would not fit perfectly flush, as it would with a 12.5mm or shorter drive. It WILL protrude on the corner which houses the drive by approximately 1mm, which is very little, but not perfect. You can see an image of the effect below to judge for yourself. Photos in this post are of a mid-2012 Macbook Pro 13. I have also done this install in a 2010 Macbook Pro 13, and the drive bay is slightly deeper, so the fit issue is almost nonexistent – perhaps .2mm.

Now that the Seagate Slim exists, there is no reason to use the Western Digital drive any longer.

Secondary Drive Choices

It goes without saying, if you do not need the space, you can simply choose the primary drive as detailed above and leave the DVD in place. However, if you need still more space, you can add any drive that is 9.5mm in height or less (and, obviously, also a 2.5″ SATA drive). In order to do this, you will need a SATA adaptor to convert the DVD cable to a standard sata connector. A neat and inexpensive solution I have used is this Hard Drive Caddy. The nice thing about this solution is it not only converts the cable, but gives you a DVD-drive shaped “shell” for the drive to fit snugly into. I did not use one of these for the photos in this post simply because I already had the sata adaptor from an older computer sitting around.

A common approach is to place an SSD (solid state drive) in the DVD location, as you can then use it as your system drive, and combine the massive speed advantages of an SSD with the storage advantage of the drive in the standard location. This is what I’ve chosen to do on three separate computers in the past, and I’ve had no issues with them and couldn’t be happier. Any SSD with a SATA connector of 9.5mm in height will do. Here are some examples. If I were buying a new SSD for this today, I would probably buy this 240GB SanDisk Extreme SSD , as it’s extremely fast for the price, and I trust Sandisk beyond all other brands. Cruicial is another great choice, as their SSDs perform well and, very importantly, they stand behind their products and make returns a breeze, should it come to that. Their M4 line is a great value and very reliable, and the M500 line is simply an improvement across the board on the older lines, and offers sizes up to 960GB!

If your only goal is max storage space, you’ll want a hard drive in the DVD location. Happily, you can now use the same 2TB Seagate mentioned above, giving you a whopping 4TB of internal in your laptop.

Alternatively, you may be able to save a few bucks and use This HGST drive, which is 1.5TB and can give you up to 3.5TB total space when used with the Seagate above. .

And that’s about it! If you have any questions, just leave a comment; I check them and respond regularly. Good luck!

The WD 2TB drive on the left, a standard Apple hard drive on the right, in the standard location.

The WD 2TB drive in the standard location drive bay (the only place you can put it in the Macbook Pro, due to its 15mm height).

The WD 2TB drive in the standard location drive bay. As you can see, it’s actually slightly shorter than the battery (in black, to the right). However, at the left corner, it does prevent full closure of the bottom of the computer by approx. 1mm.

The WD 2TB drive in the standard location drive bay, with the DVD drive having been removed to allow a second hard drive to be installed

The WD 2TB drive in the standard location drive bay, and a second had drive installed in place of the standard DVD drive (in this case, a Crucial C300 SSD I had sitting around, though any 2.5″, 9.5mm Sata drive will fit).

This shows the extent of case deformation with the WD 2TB drive in the standard location drive bay. The height of the drive prevents full closure on the effected corner, resulting in about a 1mm protrusion.

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102 thoughts on “What’s the Biggest Hard Drive You Can Fit in a Macbook Pro?”

John – thanks for this post. I have a 17″ Macbook Pro that I purchased in 2011 and my hdd is full. I have a model 8.3 and want to put in a 2T drive. The link above for the internal Seagate slim drive goes to an external drive from Seagate. Is this the link you intended or did it change since you updated the post? Thanks.

It is confusing – the Seagate Slim is the affordable way to do it, though at the cost of opening the drive – it’s $79 these days. The bare drive is available also, but for $95. It’s one of the mysteries of the universe that the bare drive is more, but it’s probably just that they sell so many more that way.

Lindsay, I also have the same MacBook Pro, model 8.3 and my Hdd is also full. Where you able to get a GOOD, NO ISSUE replacement for your original hdd? Thanks in advance for sharing your experience, is any with me. I’d like to get the biggest possible drive to replace my existing 500 GB HDD drive.
Thanks and take care!

I plan to do the 2TB drive with a SSD. Can I attach the 2TB drive in the dvd slot, transfer all the files from my old drive to the 2TB and then remove the old drive and install the SSD? Would this be the easiest way to upgrade?

If the 2TB HD you’ve got is slim, it’s no problem. It if was one of the older designs at 12.5mm or more, it won’t fit. You want a 7mm or 9.5mm drive, such as the Seagate Slim discussed here. You can boot from the drive in either location – that doesn’t matter.

Yes, I am planning to use the Seagate Slim. I guess my only question then is, if i move all files over to the slim, which files do i then want to move to and keep on the SSD? Thanks a lot for answering these questions.

Ideally, you would keep your OS and your program files on the SSD – that’s going to get most people the biggest performance gains. If you work with very large files, or a lot of small files (like video editing, or 10s of thousands of photos), those would best be kept on the SSD as well, if you had space.

Im a dj with tons of music videos and need a lot of storage space, im thinking of going with (2) 2tb hardrives for a total of 4TB that way i dont have to carry an external everywhere i go. My question is has anyone done this set up? If so how is the overall performance?

While I haven’t specifically done this with 2x 2TB drives, it will work. If you want maximum performance from it (and don’t want to spend the big bucks it would take to use 2x 2TB SSDs, you can simply RAID both 2TB HDs together and get a total sustained performance that’ll range from 160-220MB/s, which should be more than enough. Keep in mind doing it this way (Striped Array Without Parity, as it’s called, or RAID 0), you won’t have redundancy in case something goes wrong with one drive – it’s all or nothing.

Both drives are compatible with any USB port, if that’s what you’re asking. If you intend to harvest the drives to use internally in your Macbook, you can use either, just remember the 4tb is actually just 2 of the 2TB drives in a single enclosure, and buying them singly is typically cheaper. If your question is will the USB port on your 2011 MBP power the 4TB, the answer is a qualified “Yes” – it will power the 4TB drive, but it may require you use 2 of your USB ports – the drive comes with a “Y” cable to allow 2 ports to power it, if necessary. The 2011 MBP puts out about 1600MA of power per USB port, which theoretically is enough to use a single port, but late 2011 MBPs had some inconsistency in the power out put of the front port, it has been reported, so you may require 2 ports.

Great to hear! For anyone else, I just want to mention that the new 4TB drive single drive Alex is talking about is a 15mm drive – so it will not fit in the standard drive slot without spacing issues, as he mentions. It is, however, the only choice over 2TB in a single drive available at this time.

Hi I am currently in the process of installing OS X onto my 480 gig SSD. I also have a brand new 2TBslim installed and my prior 750gig HD connected by USB. I am a little unsure of some specifics though. Do I only need to install OS X on to the SSD? When i am done shall i bring all my files onto the 2TB slim and then move programs and video files over to the SSD? Would it be wise to bring those files to the SSD first and then copy all my remaining files to the slim?

It is up to you what you put on the SSD – the OS can live on either drive.

If OS X is installed on the SSD, you’ll get better system performance across the board – faster boot times, faster app launching, etc., so you probably want OS X on the SSD.

If you do a lot of video editing, you certainly should put that on the SSD, at least during the editing – it will make a significant difference. If it’s simply for playback of video – that would be a waste of the SSD, as either drive can play your video fast enough to avoid skips or buffering.

Generally speaking, you want your most used stuff and your most demanding files on the SSD, and seldom-used things on the HD. For instance – your iTunes library and all music and video files (for playback only) go on the HD – that right there is probably a huge chunk of your data.

Hey guys, I have a MacBook Pro with a 250gb SSD installed & 8GB of RAM, I current noticed after installing Bootcamp to install Windows that my C: Drive is almost full, now I’m going to get a 1TB or 2TB internal hard drive installed. I’m a producer that makes music so I wanted as much space as possible, my question is which one would be more beneficial? and would my other SSD drive be in use once my TB drive get installed ??

I’m a little unclear on what you’re asking. You say you want a 1TB or 2TB hard drive – if you really mean hard drive rather than SSD, then if it were me, I’d go with a dual drive setup, get rid of the DVD drive, replace it with this caddy, and put a 2TB Seagate into the caddy in place of the DVD drive. I’d keep your SSD as your boot drive, and use the 2TB HD for your storage. I’d also consider upgrading to 16GB of RAM, if it would be of use. If you were doing video, this would be a must, but for music you may not need it.

If I’m misunderstanding what you’re asking, please let me know, but that’s the direction I would go. Total cost would be about $87, and if you did the RAM too, it would be another $75. That’s a lot of upgrade for not a lot of dollars.

I’ve been using the caddy with the seagate slim for over a year now and just this month I’ve been having the HD eject every so often. I replaced the caddy last week and that didn’t help. I’ve read that the early 2011 MBPs have issues with sata iii drives but why would it happen after only a year.

You’re right in your question – it wouldn’t happen after a year. I would wonder if it had something to do with an software update, but this issue has been reported in the past, so that would suggest software is not the cause. I can’t help but wonder if perhaps the controller in these 2011 17″ MBPs is particularly sensitive, or perhaps the connector for the ribbon cables has an issue. Either way, all I can think of is perhaps the connection is not as good as it could be. You could take rubbing alcohol (or acetone – aka fingernail polish remover), and use it to clean the connectors on the motherboard and the cable with a Q-tip. All it takes is a bit of rubbing with the Q-tip and the cleaner of your choice will evaporate quickly, drying with no residue. Reconnect everything and put it back together.

I wish I had a better answer, but as you note, you’ve been using it for a year, so it’s not an endemic problem. As I mentioned in the other post on this subject, we haven’t seen this happen on any of the notebooks we’ve setup with dual drives.

I have a 2012 macbook pro 13 with a 1TB toshiba hard drive from microcenter, it was an external that I put into my laptop as an internal and it has worked great but it full to the max now. I want to get an external 2tb now and do the same thing I did with the one I have since the externals are cheaper. I want to just swap out drives and put a 2tb in and clone my old drive. Can you link me to the best drive to do this with? Also I need some ram. Thanks in advance!

The 2TB Seagate is as big as you can get without any physical size issue. The bonus is you can throw that old 1TB into the Seagate enclosure and use it as a USB 3 external. For your 2012 MBP, you want these RAM SODIMMs, which are only $63 for 16GB at the moment – a smoking deal.

Hi John & everyone else here,
maybe you can help me with a problem with my MacBook Pro Mid 2010. In this MBP, I already had the optical drive removed and the HDD (500 GB) was moved into the optical bay using a LMP disk doubler which has a SATA III interface. In the former HDD-bay I now have a Samsung Evo Pro 840 SSD with 256 GB on which I have the system (still running on OSX 10.9.5 aka Mavericks).
The HDD is used for data only, but as I do have lots of photos, I’m running out of disc-space and plan to replace the HDD with a new one, preferably the SpinPoint M9T (Seagate/Samsung).
I now read some reports in which users reported problems with a SATA III (6 Gigabit) HDD’s in the optical bay of a MBP Mid 2010. Does anyone of you know about these kind of problems?
When I look at the system information, I can see that my MBP only offers SATA II (3 Gigabit). The SSD does use the full 3 Gigabit “negotiated link-speed”, the HDD uses 1,5 Gigabit (I think this is because it is already quite old, as it is the original HDD built in by Apple in 2010).
Shouldn’t a modern HDD also be able to handle a lower link speed or “negotiated link-speed”? Or would you recommend using a HDD that only has SATA II? Do you know ANY internal HDD with 9,5mm height, SATAII (3 Gigabit) and a big storage capacity (at least 1TB, better 2 TB) at all?
Thanks in advance for any comments / help!

It has been reported that the optical drive bay in some 2010-2011 MBPs have issues dealing with SATA III drives, though it should be said this is not an inherent issue with using SATA III on a SATA II controller – the spec is backward compatible. It is speculated that something (the controller, or some other cause) that Apple used in the optical bay causes the reported issues. Unfortunately, Apple has never provided an explanation, and no one knows what the issue might be.

We have put dozens of SATA III drives, both HD and SSD, in the optical bays of MacBooks from 2010 forward, and haven’t seen a problem with it. That said, the reports of problems are out there – they say that the system will, from time-to-time, sporadically report the drive has “ejected” from the system, and a reboot may be required to regain access to it. Unfortunately, that’s all the info we’ve seen – no root cause info, and we haven’t seen the reported problem, so there’s not much more we can say about it.

I wish I had a better answer for you, but what I’m saying is we’ve used SATA III drives in the DVD location in 2010’s, and haven’t had problems. Others have reported problems with Sata III in the DVD bay of the MBP of those years. No one seems to know the cause of the issues reported, and since we’ve never seen an issue with it, well, we have no idea what’s going on in those cases.

If you’re in the US, I would definitely try it – order the drive from Amazon, and intensely use the system. If you see problems, you can send it back for a refund. If not, you’ve found your solution.

This is my first post and first connection with your website. This is truly and amazing and useful information. Thank you everyone for helping everyone.

I have a 2011 late model 17 inch MacBook pro. I am using El Capitan operating system and have 16 GB installed into the machine. Into thousand and 12 I did moved the DVD drive and installed a 500 GB Seagate drive into the same slot. Everything looked fine and work perfectly. I also replaced the main drive with a 500 gigabyte SSD. Everything worked well and served me well for all these years. Now, forward many years, I am replacing the 500 GB drive in the DVD caddy with a 2 terabyte drive that I recently purchased. I initialized the drive using USB connector to a one partition format. Then I took the drive out and installed it in the caddy. My MacBook Pro and I said and I was able to see the drive and the content on it. However, later when I tried to copy some stuff onto that drive the drive would not function. It kept giving me an error message that the system was an able to write to the drive. Then I went to the disk management program and tried to repartition the drive and it would not let me be partition or do anything with it. I could see it but I could not right on even erase it.

Then, I do move the drive from the casing and put it back into the USB enclosure. I attached it to my MacBook Pro, and then the partition the drive into (2) 1 GB partition. I did the drive out front the USB box and installed it back into MacBook pro caddy. Rebooted the system; and Mac book Pro was able to recognize that two 1GB partitions. I tried copying some files onto each one of the partitions and got the same error message and failed. I went to disk management program and try to repartition of a erase these partitions and could not.

Do you think it’s a problem with the type of candy I’m using? Maybe it is too old and does not comply with the new standards. Is there something I’m doing wrong?

or, is 500 GB the limit on my machine?

Another interesting note, I took the SSD drive and put it in the Caddy and try booting from it and it would not recognize it. I am starting to think that my caddie is not function properly and I need to order a new one. Any suggestions?

First of all, no, the issue is not a 500GB size limitation – that much you can be sure of. The problem is also not the 2TB partition. I would guess you decided to partition it into 2x 1TB partitions to check if that was the case, but there is no problem with 2TB partitions for either boot or data partitions that you need to worry about.

It is possible that there is an issue between the caddy and the drive that we’ve not seen – what caddy and what 2TB drive are you using? Generally speaking, the caddy is simply a SATA cable with a non-standard connector (to allow your standard SATA drive to connect to the former DVD connector, which was a different shape). In reality, though, it’s just a cable. It is possible, depending upon your caddy, that that cable was designed for SATA 2 and is having problems with a SATA 3 drive – but I should say we’ve used very old, pre SATA 3 caddies with SATA 3 drives and haven’t had problems with them, so that’s not an automatic red flag, just a possibility.

Your last note you mention, you say you put the SSD back in the caddy, and it no longer worked. I’m assuming you’re talking about the original 500GB SSD. If that was working fine and is no longer working, that suggests it’s the caddy – more specifically, it’s probably the cable. Perhaps the cable got kinked, and therefore damaged. Perhaps the SSD isn’t seated correctly on the cable connector, or on the other end of the cable. Those are the most likely issues. It is also possible something (like even a decent amount of dust) got into one of the connectors and is causing an issue.

What I would do trying to trouble-shoot this is the following:

1) I would take the caddy out and carefully look at the cable and the connectors. If they look fine, I would blow the connectors out with compressed air.

2) You have a USB – I would put the SSD in that and boot from it – if that works, you know the SSD is fine.

3) Put the SSD back in the now blown out caddy. Does it work? If so, the caddy is not the issue.

4) Try it now with the 2TB in the caddy.

Or, if you want the easier way – meaning you’re tired of taking the computer apart so much, you could simply order a new caddy. Considering how cheap they are, it may be the easiest approach.

The other thing that occurs to me is this is the 2nd recent comment by someone with a 2011 17″ having trouble with this…which makes me concerned that something in the latest OS X may be causing problems with these machines in these configurations. I can’t think of why this would be so…but it seems like a suspicious coincidence that gives me some concern for 17″ MBP owners. It’s really too soon to say, with only 2 reports, though.

thank you for a quick response. i tried everything that you suggested without success. i got a new caddy and now everything works just fine. i was told by the manufacture of the caddy that this one once is SATA 3 while most on the market are SATA 1 and SATA 2. my old once was purchased in 2011 and may have been SATA 1 or SATA 2. nevertheless, it is fixed now. Than you for your help. This is amazing site and you are an amazing person for putting it together. incredible helpful. Thanks John!!

On the same laptop, I had to replace the logic board due to faulty Graphics issues. Now this laptop has new logic board. All same configuration. However, the 2 terabyte drive installed in the DVD caddy is not functioning properly. When you first start the computer everything works fine. Means the drive shows up and you can read the contents of head. Butt as soon as you try to open any file on that drive it gives read error. Then, few minutes later the drive disappears and the error message appears on the screen that the storage device was ejected improperly. If I shutdown the computer and restart the driver pierced again and does the same thing. Do you know what’s going on? I have also gotten a new caddy from OWC and it is doing the same thing. I have also gotten a new cable that goes between caddy and the logic board but, did not help.

Have you ever heard of something like this? Any idea on how to fix this?

Other than updating the firmware, as mentioned in your other post, and checking the connections as we discussed in the previous post, I don’t know what else to suggest. Your system was working correctly, then you had a logic board change due to a graphics issue, and now you have the problems, if I’m reading this correctly. That reset all of the above things (firmware, cables), so those are the places to look for problems. Update the firmware, check stability. Double-check cables as well. Those are the only things that have changed, so the problem must lie in one of those areas, it would seem.

Well my “late 2011” Macbook Pro 17 is now equipped with two excellent Samsung EVO 850 SSD, 2Tb each, for a total capacity of 4TB, all SSD!
The problem, indeed, is that the SSD mounted in the optical bay caddy does not work reliably, and is significantly slower than the identical one mounted in the main bay.
I swapped the SSDs, and the problem is the same: the one mounted in the caddy does not perform optimally.
I have read that this is due to improper handling of SATA3 speed on these Late-2011 MBP. The recommended solution would be to use a SATA2 SSD, but of course no 2 Tb SSD is available with SATA2 speed.
I changed my caddy, purchasing an “Optibay Extreme”, which claims to solve the problem. In reality, the problem is just mitigated, but not solved.
So the question is: do you know about a caddy which actually forces the negotiated speed to drop to SATA2, even if the SSD is SATA3? I think that would be the only reliable solution. It will half the speed of my excellent second SSD, but that is used mostly for data storage, so SATA2 speed would be perfectly fine. Now, due to continuous errors and retransmissions, the speed is worst than with a mechanical drive! And sometimes the system hangs completely…

Does anybody know how to update the firmware on a MacBook Pro 17 inch 2011 late model? The firmware on the logic board is different than the firmware number appears on the Apple website for that laptop. I have tried updating it using the method outline on Apple website without any success. Is there any way to force update the firmware? I am talking about SMC update as well as EFI update. Both numbers are different on my machine then what the current firmware update posted on Apple website. Thank you for your help in advance.

I tried downloading the firmware and installing it using the directions for writing on their website. It does not do anything. The system reboot beeps restarts again the firmware number Remains the Same.

the logic board is replaced by a 3rd party. I don’t know if apple store will honor that. That is why i am tying to do this myself. I will go to apple store this morning and see what they say. Hopefully, Yes!. I will update this post. if the issue is solved

I have the same issue. I’d lived happily with 2TB seagate drive (DVD bay) + SSD until well known MBP 2011 graphics issue appeared, I went to apple and they replaced the logic board (thank you, Apple!). At the same time they pulled my HDD out of the computer and also replaced my SSD with HGST 1TB HDD. The returned my original 2 disks in a separate package.

Of course I put my disks back. But my original HDD is not working now, with the same symptoms as yours. It appears, I can see files on it, but can’t write anything to it. I’ve tried to swap SSD and HDD, no luck, the machine doesn’t boot in this case. If I put it into USB enclosure it works fine. So, the disk itself is OK. BUT! If I put apple’s HGST into the DVD bay it works fine.

The only difference I see is HGST’s max current is 700ma while seagate’s is 1A. May be it requires more current while writing and new logic board doesn’t provide enough power.. Just a guess.

Bob, it’s unlikely that the cause is the current draw delta the drives. Apple must have installed a fresh OS X on your new HD they installed – most likely that new install doesn’t have permissions to your old drive, and there’s possibly an OS X issue on the old drive. Can you boot from the Seagate when it’s on USB by holding down the option key at boot?

If not, I would migration assistant your Seagate’s contents to the HGST (may require you backing some stuff up off the Seagate to reduce it to 1TB used). Then clone the HGST to the Seagate. Boot from Seagate via USB. If that works, put Seagate back in the computer, and move your other files back to it.

Unfortunately, I’m about to go on a trip, and I’ll be gone for a week, so I should mention I doubt I’ll be able to respond in the near future.

Assuming I am using 16Gb ram and that 1TB internal storage is enough for me, what is the best option in terms of performance? For example will 4tb ssd raid 0 setup (remove the optical drive and use 2x 2tb ssd) be the fastest and if so would it be significantly faster than a 128gb ssd with a 1TB HDD?

You could RAID two of these at 500GB each (for a total of 1TB) for $300 and have throughput of about 1100MB/s. You would get slightly better performance with the PRO version, for another $140, but I doubt you’d find the difference worth the additional money.

And yes, a RAID of 2xSSD will be far faster than an SSD and a HD – twice as fast on everything (because 2xSSDs), and about 10x as fast as reading from the HD itself – and that doesn’t even count the improvement in speed when you’re doing small reads – the latency improvement of SSDs over HDs is HUGE – about 100x faster.

I have bought an Apple Macbook Pro (early 2015) with 128GB Hard drive and 8GB of Ram and I want to upgrade the RAM to 16GB which I know how to do and where to find Apple verified RAM but what I am having trouble with is “If I am able to upgrade my Macbook Pro from 128GB to +3TB of hard drive or solid state hard drive?”

Your MacBook is a Retina model, correct? If so, you need to look for Retina Macbook Pro and Macbook Air SSDs, which are NOT the standard SSDs on this page (they’re a whole different form-factor, and not compatible). Also, Retina machines can not have the RAM upgraded, I’m sorry to say – it’s very important to buy a Retina / Air / 12″ Macbook with the amount of RAM you’ll need, as it can not be upgraded after the fact.

2TB is it for slim drives – there are 4TB drives in a 2.5″ size now, but they’re 15mm tall, and would fit in the original HD location with the same fitment issues pictured in this post regarding the original 2TB WD drive.

Thanks for this incredible information. I’m a bit of a newbie and having issues with the speed on my Macbook Pro mid 2012. It currently carries 500 GB SATA drive. I did some research and discovered that Seagate has SSHDs that can give me a combination of speed and space at very little as compared to SSDs giving me the same. I almost went in for a 1 TB SSHD Seagate, but I realise I may also have the option of just buying and adding on a pure SSD giving me about 240 GB for approx the same price and just use my old HDD as a storage for heavy files. I know I get about 250 GB less storage with this option. My questions:
1. Will I be able to use these 2 drives together on my Mac? If yes, will it give me a better speed performance than replacing the old SATA with a Seagate hybrid?
2. Where do I put the drives? I’m ok to let go of my DVD drive.
3. How about an option of picking up the hybrid and using it along with the existing storage drive? That would give me 1.5 TB of space but will it give me the performance?

We have tested the SSHD against convention HDs and SSDs, and they do have their place, but the way they work makes their test results very inconsistent, so we didn’t feel we could publish reliable results. Let me explain.

The SSHD uses a small, built-in SSD to cache your most commonly-used data, so that when that “Most used 8GB of data” is requested, it reads directly from the SSD. This tiny built-in SSD is not as fast as the SSDs you’re looking at as stand-alones, but 2-3x faster than a normal HD. This means that yes, you’ll see a speed bump on certain things, but it’ll perform like a convention HD for other things. Also, what gets cached is constantly changing, depending upon how often you use it (it’s constantly swapping in and out what you’re using most). For this reason, you won’t see significantly faster boot times (unless all you were doing was repeatedly booting), but when playing a game, it can speed things up. It’s not nearly the impact of a full SSD, though.

To answer your questions:

1) Yes – this is the fastest option. The SSD will greatly speed up whatever you put on it. Make it your OSX disk and your computer will be MUCH faster. Using the SSD + HD option will make your system feel like a new computer – the SSHD will not.

2) Put the SSD in the normal HD spot, and move the HD to the DVD spot.

3) Using the SSHD with a HD will give you the small, “sometimes” boost I wrote about above, and give you more storage, but it won’t make your computer way faster.

Maxing out RAM is great, but if you go the SSD route, it’s not AS important, because your swap file will be on the SSD, so it will speed that up too. I would always upgrade the RAM if I had the money, but if I had to choose between RAM and going to an SSD…I’d probably go with the SSD if I didn’t typically run a ton of programs at once.

I would go the SSD + your old HD route, if you’d be ok with 750GB of space.

Thank you John! Do you think there is anyway I can retain the DVD drive and still manage to put both the other disks in? (Just so I know the options). Could you clarify what you mean by ‘swap’ file?
Also, now that I am exploring pure SSDs I find quite a bit of price difference between different brands. On Amazon a 250 GB Samsung 850 EVO is about 40% more than a 240 GB Kingston or a Sandisk SSD. Am I missing something or is that a premium Samsung commands?

Hi John. Just butting in on this as I noticed your comment about putting the SSD in the normal HD spot and not the other way around. I have two 240GB SSD drives on my second hand mac that I just bought, but need to replace one with a 4TB HD so that I have more space. Based on earlier info I thought it would be better to replace the one in the regular drive location as this is shock protected whereas the DVD spot isn’t. Is this correct? And am I right that the only option for doing this is using the Seagate 4TB 15mm drive you’ve mentioned earlier? Just double checking as they are 5400 RPM and I’d prefer 7200. Thanks for the help – such a useful page!

Hi. If you need 4TB, the only choice is the Seagate, and the only location is the HD bay – the DVD bay can only accommodate up to 9.5mm drives. Some 2011 MBP owners have reported issues with Sata3 drives spontaneously dismounting in the CD bay, though we have used them (and SSDs) in the DVD location in 2010, 2011, and 2012 MBPs without issue. I mention this just fyi – it may be best to stick to Amazon or someone else with easy returns, should you find issues.

It’s a little lower spec than the Samsung 850, but you wouldn’t be disappointed. Get it here for $116. It’s still over 400MB/s (as opposed to your roughly 100MB/s with your hard drive), and it’s just such a deal right now.

I just bought a used MBP mid 2012 with a working Fusion drive 250GB SSD + 750GB Toshiba. Bought a Samsung Spinpoint M9T 2TB to replace the Toshiba in the optical bay. The M9T will not erase/format using either Disk Utility or Terminal Window. Error message “3149824): input/output error, newfs_hfs: 9write(sector 6152): invalid argument. Mounting disk, Could not mount disk1s2 with name (null) after erase, File system formatter failed, Operation failed … ” Also Info before format shows the drive as not writable. Any ideas how to proceed?

I just bought a used MBP 15 mid 2012. I’m planning to switch the original 500GB HDD for a fresh 2-4 TB HDD. (Speed is not an issue to me, but space is…) But I’ve read about the 15 mm HDD, that is a bit too big for the bay. Are there other aspects on this, apart from the 1 mm protrusion? For example noise or vibrations, compared to 7 or 9 mm HDDs? I noted that the original mount has soft rubber rings etc. Is that to minimize noise, or to protect the HDD? Another question: is the 128MB cache useful, compared to for example a 16MB cache? The last question: will I notice any remarkable difference in battery time by installing a HDD that needs more power in idle and read/write mode?

Hi, Anders. The elastic dampers are basically to shock-mount the drive. They provide a some vibration damping too, but they’re mainly there to protect the drive in the event of a big bump. The bigger cache definitely makes a difference, but it’s impossible to give you concrete figure to say how big the impact is. You won’t notice a difference in battery life going to a 9.5mm 2.5″ 2TB – it’s still 3 platters (and the drive components will be lower-power than that 2012 drive). Going to the 15mm drives, you’re looking at 4 platters, so there will be a small hit, but not much.

I have a MBP 8,2 with a SSD in the primary drive bay and a caddy adapter with HDD in place of the optical drive. I’ve had my logic board replaced twice by Apple for graphics card failure. After the first time, the drives continued working correctly. The second time, Apple replaced my 2TB 3rd party HDD with an Apple 1TB HDD, and returned the 2TB HDD in a bag, saying it was broken. I put it in a USB enclosure and it worked fine. I then swapped it into my computer in the caddy adapter, and I could read from it, but got Finder -50 error when I tried to write to it. I removed it, and tried a number of other drives: a 750GB worked fine, the 1TB replacement from Apple worked fine, a Seagate 2TB would not work, nor would my original 2TB.

I’ve tried wiping the 2TB, but even when it is empty, I cannot write to it. I restored my files to it, still can’t write to it.

Error 50 means something about the file you’re attempting to copy is incompatible with the destination format, in theory. But, it can be triggered in other situations – here’s a thread with a lot of good info.

The first thing is – are both volumes HPFS+? If not, that’s likely the issue.

Either way, I would start with formatting the 2TB drive (preferably as a GPT disk) just to get a clean start and see if it helps. Odds are a file (or many files) you’re trying to transfer have something illegal in them to the receiving drive.

You have my sympathy – we see the 50 error a lot in cross-platform transfers and they’re a huge and time-consuming pain to work around.

Exact same problem as you. Im trying to pass all the information in the drive to a backup to try to format the drive and see if that solves the problem. But its being a pain in the… because I also have errors copying the files to a usb dirive. Error code -36.

So , finally I couldn’t solve the problem. I found that the problem is that the optibay sata of this model (MBP early 2011) have a problem managing any 6GB/S drive. So aparently my older logic board had a 3gb/s sata in the optibay, and thats why it worked like a charm. Now that they change it I see that the optibay sata is sata 3 6gb/s. So in conclution I have to find a new drive 3gb/s only. The problem is that I think there is no option like that for 2TB drive that fits the optimal (9mm high). If anybody knows an alternative , it would be of great help.

Okay so i have a macbook pro 13″ mid 2012. Upgraded my ram to 16GB and have a Samsung SSD 850 EVO 1TB about 8months ago. Everything was working fine then had a cable problem as the macbook would not boot up and kept on showing the no entry sign and would just try boot half way and reboot constantly on a loop. Spoke to apple tec support and tried to fix via disk utility but no joy. Took it to a authorised apple tech support and they said it is apparently a common problem on these mid 2012’s and was under the apple replacement program…ask after the repair which cable it was and they would not tell me-wanted to know incase this happens again, do you know which cable it is?

After this am now looking at removing the DVD drive and installing another 1 or 2TB SSD in the DVD location. Wanted to know

1-if i install the 2nd SSD of 1 or 2TB can this be in a raid configuration?
2-Could i just use the 2nd SSD in the DVD tray as backup mirror of the 1st? so if my 1st SSD goes i could just replace it with the 2nd SSD with out having install any OSX as it would be direct mirror of the 1st?
3-Would it be easier to set the 2 SSD’s of either 2TB or 3TB (depending on which one i purchase) in raid config and just buy an External HDD of 2/3TB and use for backup?
4-The 2nd SSD size is 7 or 9mm height 2.5″ sata 2 or 3?
5-Which sata 2 or 3 connection is better for my machine showing (link speed and negotiated link speed at 6 Gigabit) to run the 2nd SSD or does it not matter – confused about this?
6-Which hard drive caddy is recommended: this one below: also the caddy does not determine the size of the SSD right?https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0058AH2US/ref=as_li_tf_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=B0058AH2US&linkCode=as2&tag=ttips-20
7-Any additional cables needed for the 2nd SSD with caddy?

Hi, I’ll do my best to respond and maybe others will chime in.
As to the cable – there is a single cable connecting your SSD to the motherboard, so that would be the one. I have to wonder if the tech you brought it to replaced the cable, or if the cable actually just came loose, but that’s pure speculation on my part. As to your other questions:

1) It could be RAID 0 or 1 if you wanted. The mac mini I’m typing this on is running the same config you’re talking about with 2x 850 Evos in a striped set, so I’ll attach a benchmark of it to give you an idea, but it’s a very fast setup.

2) You could do that as well, though of course it would be much cheaper to simply put a 1TB HD in that spot, and do a regular sync via CCC or some other cloner, rather than using it as a RAID’d clone. We do this on our Mac Mini servers.

3) It wouldn’t be easier, but it would be far faster, and a more efficient use of your $$. See point 1 above.

4) it can be up to 9.5mm in the DVD spot.

5) You definitely want a caddy that is SATA III compliant.

6) Yes, we have used that caddy successfully.

7) The caddy includes the proprietary cable you’ll need to put a HD or SSD in the DVD area.

Thank you for your feedback and now have some different options to consider.

My other option is to get the early 2015 13 or 15 inch retina macbook pro with 16GB Ram. Wanted to know if either of these
two machines can be configured with 2TB flash ssd? I know the apple website states 1TB is possible?
Can you recommend any flash ssd that will fit?

This is where things get tough for Apple owners. When Apple made the switch to PCIe SSDs, they were ahead of the game, and they went with their own connectors and shapes…and they’re not compatible with any standard. Even the newer MBPR’s with NVME PCIe SSDs don’t conform to standards, which means you can’t simple buy the awesome new Samsung 960, for instance, and put it in your Apple product – they’re incompatible.

Your only choice for 2015 Retina SSD upgrades is to buy from Apple (current limit 1TB), or wait for someone like OWC or Transcend to come out with upgrades for the 2015 MBPRs. As you can see from those links, they currently only offer upgrades for 2012-2013 Models.

We’ve used 2x SSDs the way you’re considering in many machines, and haven’t had issues. The advantage of going with a 2nd SSD in the DVD location instead of a larger SSD in a single location is of course the stripe speed benefits. Any single SSD will max out about 550MB/s, whereas running 2x SSDs will get you over 900MB/s. Appreciably faster SSDs for these machines will never become reality, because these are intrinsic SATA3 limitations – this is why the newer MacBooks (and almost all other machines) have abandoned SATA in favor of PCIe SSDs.

I have a mac book pro end 2011……….i have already a 1 tera SSD samsung EVO witch replace the first internal 750 giga HD

Now i read that the maximum SSD i can put as a first HD is 2 tera…. i can’t put 4 tera samsung EVO…. but what if i put 4 tera SSD has a first HD but slipt in 2 part of 2 tera… means it could works with 2 OSX choose to boot when computer start….. So? (of course I instal first the 2 OSX when the 4 tera SSD is an external HD and after i put it inside my mac as a first HD

Tobias – Actually, you can put the 4TB Samsung Evo SSD in your primary HD location in your MacBook – it’s the same size and technology as the previous 2TB, so anywhere the 2TB will work, the 4TB will work.

I have to apologize for the confusion; we moved offices and we’ve been swamped with projects and I haven’t updated this post with the 4TB SSDs.

Adrian, I apologize, I don’t know how I missed your question. The Samsung you point to is, in fact, the same drive as the Seagate. If I recall correctly, Seagate bought Samsung’s entire HD business a while ago.

Actually scratch my link, I kept reading and learned that the Samsung drives are made by Seagate using many of the same parts. If you know of any other brand/drive I could look to I would be most appreciative!

Thanks for the informative post. I am considering upgrading my 13 inch Mid 2012 MBP. I’m looking for speed and for storage. I’m a photographer and currently have 4 external drives sitting on my desk! (2 of which are the 2 TB Seagate Slims)

So this is what I was thinking:
1. Swap out my internal HDD for the Evo 850 – 1 TB SSD or the equivalent Crucial 1TB
2. Swap out the optical drive and putting in a 4 TB drive for storage.

Reading your article it seems that I should do the opposite? Install the SSD in the optical drive bay with tray and the larger HDD in the primary HD location? Is the SSD just as fast in the optical drive as it is in the primary drive location? Which 4 TB drive is recommened?

By “harvest” in regards to the Seagate slims do you mean extract from the case? Is there a safe way/video showing how to do this?

The reason the SSD goes in the optical spot is the HD won’t fit there – it’s too thick for the location (max height there is 9.5mm, the 4TB is 15mm).

By “harvest” the drive, I do mean simply pulling it out. The reason I suggest the external drive as a starting point is it’s not only a little cheaper than the drive bare, but it gives you the external USB interface you’re going to need to clone your drive as well (and a new enclosure for your old drive).

You can, however, buy the drive bare as well – it’s the Samsung Momentus 4TB. You would need the cable you referenced in that case, or something like it. I should say I don’t know that cable you referenced, but I’ve had poor experiences with that type of “all-in-one” in the past. That said, from the reviews, that looks like a good unit.

As to cloning I always use CCC simply because it works and I’ve got it already. You can absolutely clone your internal drive to the external SSD before installing it, in fact I recommend it. Then you can boot to the newly cloned USB SSD by holding the “Option” key during startup and selecting it – I like to do this to confirm it’s properly cloned and all is working before pulling the machine apart to install the new drive.

John, thanks for creating this page, it is very informative. I am considering upgrading my 15″ 2012 MBP and was wondering if the Seagate Barracuda 4TB ST4000LM024 is a possible choice? If not I will purchase the slim and harvest the drive. Is the Samsung Momentus a more reliable HDD than the Barracuda? Any info is much appreciated.

I have a MACBOOK PRO (17-INCH, LATE 2011)
Date of Purchase: 28-Jan-12. I would like to replace my existing with the fastest 1TB or 2TB that would work well in that unit. Is the can an SSD that could replace my current hard drive for that model.

Robert, the easy solution while keeping your DVD drive is to buy this 1TB or 2TB Samsung. This will get you read/write speeds of 450-500MB/s in real-world use, which is as fast as the bus in your computer can deliver. The nice thing is this drive can move with you in the future to any computer that has a standard SATA3 drive connector, as there’s nothing proprietary about it.

The faster solution you could pursue would be to put two of these drives in your machine, with one replacing the DVD drive. The advantage of that is it combines both SATA ports, giving you up to 900-950MB/sec. The disadvantage being that it’s more complicated, and there are issues, on occasion, with 2011 17″ MacBook Pros running these drives in the DVD location, so there’s some risk that it won’t work for you. It’s also, needless to say, more expensive. Only you can say whether the additional speed is worth the effort.

The good news is that either solution will be a massive upgrade: it’s a much bigger performance impact than the 8x or so speed increase (with 1 SSD) would suggest, because it greatly improves small disk reads and writes, which is the majority of what your computer does in regular use.

I have a MBP 15″ Mid 2012.
I installed 2TB SSD in the main slot and a 1TB SSD in the optical drive location using a caddy.
Now I want to upgrade the storage to 2 x 4TB, will they work?
Size wise I think the Samsung EVO’s 850 4TB will fit BUT my worry is the 4TB storage size and whether the MBP interface and cables will accept it!
I say this because I cannot install a 2TB SSD in the DVD slot, the MBP will not see it if it is more than 1TB!
Am I doing something wrong?
Is the caddy I am using a “bad” quality one that is preventing the 2TB or more SSD from being recognized?
Can you please advise me?

Ammar, there is no technical limitation on the DVD interface location allowing it to use a 1TB SSD but not a 4TB. You seem to be saying that the 2TB works fine in your HD location, but doesn’t appear at all in the DVD location? If so, this is a puzzle. The fact that your 1TB works there tells us the cable and caddy are fine. Both drives are SATA3, and aside from capacity, use the same hardware. If you are certain the connection was properly seated when you tried the 2TB, then we have to speculate what the issue could be. It is likely the 2TB uses more flash controller chips than the 1TB, which could cause an issue or exceed a limitation of the port, theoretically, but this is pure speculation. The number of controller chips should be invisible to the SATA interface, so it should not cause an issue. I would suggest calling Samsung tech support (assuming you’re using a Samsung drive), and ask they think the issue is. They should know, if there is one.

As to your other questions, the 4TB is physically the same size as any slimline 2.5″ drive, and will fit. It certainly isn’t something you’re doing wrong, unless there was a cable seating issue.

Thank you John.
What you say seems logical: “It is likely the 2TB uses more flash controller chips than the 1TB, which could cause an issue or exceed a limitation of the port, theoretically, but this is pure speculation”.
I am afraid to buy 4TB drives and find out that I cannot use them in the Optical drive bay!
I know I have read somewhere that there is indeed a difference and a limitation on the optical drive SATA connection that limits it to maybe 1TB, unfortunately I cannot remember where I had read this!
I am using Samsung drives but the problem is their support is hidden somewhere behind a million questions and FAQ pages!
I wish someone with a MacBook Pro 15″ mid 2012 can confirm that they are using 2TB in the optical bay and it is working well!
If you think of anything else, please let me know.
By the way, is there a way for this blog to notify me by email when there is a post here?
Thanks again.

I have MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid 2012). have a Samsung 850 EVO 1TB SSD in the main drive and was going upgrade to just a 2TB of the same make. But i have seen there is Samsung 2TB 860 EVO Sata III 64L V NAND SSD coming out on the 29th of Jan 2018.

Am assuming this will fit and work just like the 850 as its the replacement for the 850?

If not then will go down the raid config road with 2 x 1TB by removing the cd tray.